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Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 32.2 (2011): 49-88

“I certainly have the subjects in my mind”: The Diary of Anne Frank as Bildungsroman

Daniel Paul O’Donnell

This article examines the techniques used by Anne Frank in revising her diaries for what she intended to be a post war publication. The article begins by reviewing the scholarly and political contexts in which the Diaries are normally discussed. It then shows the extent to which Frank’s revisions of her diaries (from the “a” to “b” versions) were the result of a conscious rethinking of the work’s purpose and audience and begun only after several months’ deliberation. Finally, the article looks at the nature of the revisions Frank made to the content of her diaries, focussing primarily on the first few months. In these entries in particular Frank shows a willingness to alter the known facts of her history in order to improve the plot and emotional impact of her experiences. She shortens time-lines, reduces the number of characters, and deletes and adds events and dialogue all with an eye towards emphasizing the extraordinary nature of the events that had overfallen her and the degree to which they allowed for the development of her latent ability as an author. In rewriting the Diary as Het Achterhuis, Frank was not simply revising: her second version is an artistic reworking of the raw material in her daily journals, a reworking that reflects clear literary goals.

Key terms: Anne Frank; book history; authorial history; revision practices; authorial intention; diaries; Bildungsroman; children’s literature.

Deborah E. Lipstadt begins a section on the Diary of Anne Frank in her book Denying the Holocaust by noting that Frank’s work “has become one of the … most popular targets” for neo-Nazis, and other so-called “revisionists” interested in suppressing historical knowledge of the Holocaust. She goes on to add:

It would seem to be a dubious allocation of the deniers’ energies that they try to prove that a small book by a young girl full of musings about her life, relationship with her parents, emerging sexuality, and movie stars was not really written by her.

(Lipstadt 1993a, 229)

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DANIEL PAUL O’DONNELL: THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK AS BILDUNGSROMAN


But Lipstadt is being disingenuous. Anne Frank’s diaries have never been understood as being simply “a small book by a young girl” and Holocaust deniers are not the only ones that have been impressed by their historical importance. From the time of their first publication in 1947 in Dutch, and especially since the appearance of their English translation in 1952, Frank’s diaries have been a massive international best seller (on the history of the diaries’ publication, see Stroom 2004; the Dutch publication history is discussed in Kuitert 2010). By 1993, they had sold more than 20 million copies in over forty countries (Lipstadt 1993a, 230; see also Wikipedia contributors 2012c). They have also rarely dropped out of the popular and scholarly press. American discussion of the diaries began almost immediately after the Dutch text was published (e.g. Levin 1950), and even sub-aspects of their transmission and reception, like their adaptation to the stage, have come to develop their own scholarly traditions and bibliographies (e.g. for the play, see among others, Barnouw 2004a; Melnick 1997; Ozick 1997; Graver 1995; Rosenfeld 1991; Levin 1973; Hackett and Goodrich 1954).

So what is it, then, about the diaries that makes them so controversial? Why do Holocaust deniers consider it worth their while attempting to prove them to be a forgery (for the immense bibliography of attempts to deny the authenticity of the diaries, begin with Barnouw 2004b; Lipstadt 1993a)? And why have legitimate scholars and organizations devoted so much effort to demonstrating their authenticity, significance, and accuracy (some sense of the expense and energy involved in this project can be gained from the introduction to Frank 2004)?

In the case of the neo-Nazis, as Lipstadt has shown, the main cause lies in a falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus approach to World War II history. By casting doubt on this one source of Holocaust historiography, the deniers hope to cast doubt on our whole knowledge of Nazi atrocities during World War II. Thus, in what is probably the most famous attack on the diaries' authenticity, Robert Faurisson calls attention to the noise the inhabitants of the Annexe make, focussing particularly on the use of a vacuum cleaner described in Frank's entry for 5 August, 1943:

Let us take the example of the noises. Those in hiding, we are told, must not make the least sound. This is so much so that, if they cough, they quickly take codeine. The “enemies” could hear them. The walls are that “thin” (25 March 1943). Those “enemies” are very numerous: Lewin, who “knows the whole building well” (1 October 1942), the men from the store, the customers, the deliverymen, the agent, the cleaning woman, the night watchman Slagter, the plumbers, the “health service”, the accountant, the police who conduct their searches of the premises, the

DANIEL PAUL O’DONNELL: THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK AS BILDUNGSROMAN 51


neighbors both near and far, the owner, etc. It is therefore unlikely and inconceivable that Mrs. Van Daan had the habit of using the vacuum cleaner each day at 12:30 pm (5 August 1943). The vacuum cleaners of that era were, moreover, particularly noisy. I ask: “How is that conceivable?” My question is not purely formal. It is not rhetorical. Its purpose is not to show astonishment. My question is a question. It is necessary to respond to it. That question could be followed with forty other questions concerning noises.

[....] In order to dispute the authenticity of the story, one could call upon

arguments of a psychological, literary, or historical nature. I will refrain from that here. I will simply remark that the physical absurdities are so serious and numerous that they must have an effect on the psychological, literary, and historical levels …

The absurdities of the Diary are those of a poor imagination that develops outside of a lived experience. They are worthy of a poor novel or of a poor lie. Every personality, however poor it may be, contains what it is proper to call psychological, mental, or moral contradictions. I will refrain from demonstrating here that Anne's personality contains nothing like that. Her personality is invented and is as hard to believe as the experience that the Diary is supposed to relate. From a historical point of view, I would not be surprised if a study of the Dutch newspapers, the English radio and Dutch radio from June 1942 to August 1944 would prove fraud on the part of the real author of the diary. On 9 October 1942, Anne speaks already of Jews “being gassed” (Dutch text: “Vergassing”)!

(Faurisson 1982)

In fact, as the seemingly casual reference at the end of this passage to the entry for 9 October, 1942 suggests, it is not the Franks' cleaning schedule that is Faurisson's real concern. By “demonstrating” that the vacuum cleaner episode could not have happened on 5 August as the diaries suggest, Faurisson is actually attempting to convince us that the Holocaust could not have happened either (Faurisson’s other major project was “demonstrating” that the gas chambers were also a hoax. See Lipstadt 1993a, 224-229; Wikipedia contributors 2012a, b): if the Frank's cleaning schedule has been faked, then there is no reason to trust the authenticity of any of its evidence for more significant historical events, including contemporary knowledge of the gassing of the Jews in occupied Europe. In other words, if the diaries can be shown to be a retrospective falsification, they become additional evidence in the deniers’ project of asserting that the Holocaust itself is an anti-Nazi lie.

There is not much one can say in the face of this kind of “scholarship”, except, perhaps, to point out the intellectual poverty of its approach and errors that lie behind its evidentiary claims. Or in this case to point out that Frank is

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generally careful to explain why unusual noises did not lead to the immediate betrayal of the Annexe's inmates; that when she doesn't, the general tenor is that the actions and noises she is describing were in fact dangerous to their survival (Barnouw 2004b);1 and, of course, that Faurisson is correct that the inhabitants of the Annexe could not have made that much noise and remain undetected: the Annexe was raided in the end, after all, and its inhabitants send to concentration camps, where, in 1945, Anne Frank died.2

More sophisticated and better-trained scholars, for their part, do not dispute the over-all accuracy of Frank's diaries. Instead, they tend to focus on their social, historical, and even psychological value (see Barnouw 2004c for a brief overview of scholarship on Anne Frank and her diaries); about whether the Frank’s story is typical of Jewish experiences during World War II (e.g. Van Galen Last & Wolfswinkel 1996, esp. 140–145). Or about whether the iconization of Anne Frank as the archetypal Nazi victim has had a positive or negative effect on Holocaust remembrance (see Bernard 2000; Bettelheim 1960). They ask themselves about the reasons why the diaries have proven to be such a big hit with popular audiences (e.g. Rosenfeld 1991), what they tell us about the psychological development of adolescents (Dam 2001; Haviland & Kramer 1991; Evert 1991), or whether there is a hidden antisemitism in our preference for this story of an assimilated and well-educated Western Jew over the equally (or even

1 In his discussion of the flaws in Faurisson's argument, Barnouw makes one important error. In

the entry for November 9, 1942, Frank describes an incident in which a bag of beans Peter is carrying splits and spills over the stairs. The result, Frank suggests, was een lawaai als een ordeel, ‘noise... enough to waken the dead’ (version b [see below for discussion of the Diaries’ textual history]. Dutch text: Frank 2004; translation Frank 2003). Barnouw's criticism of Faurisson, who cites this entry as an example of the diaries' implausibility, is that he “omits to quote the next sentence" Goddank was er geen vreemde in huis (‘Thank God there were no strangers in the house’). This is a valid criticism of Faurisson, who used published versions of the Diary in which this sentence appears for his research. The sentence, however, was not in Frank's original text (compare the b and c versions in Frank 2004). It appears to have been added during copy-editing of the first Dutch edition. 2 Almost needless to say, Faurisson's suggestion that Frank could not have heard rumours that

Jews were being "gassed" by the Nazis by October 9, 1942 is almost as easily answered by the surviving evidence. The first public published notice of the use of gas against Jews appeared in the Daily Telegraph on June 25, 1942 ("Germans murder 700,000 Jews in Poland"). The story was widely repeated in England and abroad in the following days and followed soon after by additional reports (see Ward 1993; also Lipstadt 1993b, 164). Although the BBC was generally reluctant to broadcast allegations of mass murder (Ward 1993), there is some evidence that they covered these stories and related revelations in their newscasts (Burleigh 2011, 449; Frank 2003, 293 (note)). As Frank notes in the description of their daily life in the very entry cited by Faurisson, moreover, these broadcasts were followed closely and regularly by the inhabitants of the Annexe who were hungry generally for news and rumour of the progress of the war.



more) horrific stories told by the less assimilated, less wealthy, or less well-educated (see especially Doneson 1987; 1992; Dresden 1991, 197–198).

Extract recording the death of Anne Frank from the Archief van de Commissie tot het doen van Aangifte van Overlijden van Vermisten, 1949-1962, July 29, 1954. © Erfgoed in Beeld, 2010.

License: Creative Commons 2.0 BY.

At the same time, however, it is difficult not to feel with Lipstadt some surprise at the depth and breadth of this interest: at the idea that this particular diary has been able to provoke such controversy and attract this amount and kind of scrutiny from pseudo and serious scholars alike. For while Frank's diaries have always been understood as being much more than simply “a small book by a young girl full of musings about her life, relationship with her parents, emerging sexuality, and movie stars”, they also actually are “a small book by a young girl full of musings about her life, relationship with her parents, emerging sexuality, and movie stars”. There are many other war diaries, including diaries that focus more directly on the issues most at stake in most debates about Frank's work (e.g. Hillesum 1996; Koker 2012; Englishman 2007; see more generally Dewulf 2010). In as much as they are neither about the Holocaust nor a witness to much more of the war than can be seen occasionally outside Frank's Amsterdam window, the choice of her diaries as a major locus of scholarly discussion about the Holocaust and Jewish experience of the war in occupied Europe does sometimes seem odd. As we shall see, moreover, the diaries themselves are not necessarily always well-suited to support the burden placed upon them even by legitimate scholars, not because they are a forgery – after the extensive investigations by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in mid 1980s, there can be no doubt about their authenticity – but rather because the

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evidence of their compositional history suggests that Frank was not primarily interested in providing documentary evidence of a social, historical, or even psychological kind.

On the one hand, as was recognized during the war itself, the enormity of Nazi crimes requires documentation. We want and need first-person accounts of what happened to keep reminding us that it in fact did happen. On the other hand, however, there is considerable evidence to suggest that Frank herself did not intend her book to fulfill this need. While she was in fact prompted into revising her diaries for publication by a call for precisely such documentation by the Dutch government in exile in March 1944, Frank seems paradoxically to have been inspired by this call to turn her journal into a much more self-consciously contrived and artistic performance. In rewriting her diaries with an eye to post-war publication, Frank appears to have been far less interested in producing a rigidly accurate evidentiary document than she was in using her experiences to create a literary memoir concerning her growth as a writer and human being under an extraordinary set of circumstances. The result is more Bildungsroman than ego-document: a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, whose main character has as much in common with a semi-fictional character like Joyce's alter ego Stephan Dedalus as it does with the diarist/authors in the work of war memoirists like Koker, Hillesum, and Englishman.3

I have been writing thus far rather noncommittally of Frank’s “diaries”. Before going any further, we need to clarify exactly which diaries we are referring to. Frank wrote more than one account of her life in the Annexe and there are significant differences in scope, episodes, organization, and wording both among these versions and among subsequent transcriptions, editions, and translations.

Just before the Frank family went into hiding, Frank was given a small plaid-covered diary for her thirteenth birthday (unless otherwise noted, details of the textual history in this and the following paragraphs are derived from Stroom 2004; Kuitert 2010). The version of the diary she began in this book is usually referred to as “the notebooks” or “a text”. She began writing in it right away (a note on the front endpaper is dated 12 June, 1942), and continued to do so on a relatively regular basis in this and subsequent notebooks right up until

3 In making this argument, I am neither making a specific generic claim that Frank's work matches

formal criteria for the Bildungsroman as this is or was at the time understood in English or German literary studies (for example, as discussed in Boes 2006) nor suggesting that other types of diaries present readers with an unmanipulated record of their authors' lives and opinions. Rather, I am arguing that in this case Frank was consciously manipulating facts, events, opinions, and characters to fit a larger literary purpose, even if this leads her to introduce minor distortions in what we know from her other writings and eye-witness accounts to be the historical record. As we shall see, Frank's revised text is a deliberately and self-consciously shaped document.



three days before her arrest on 4 August, 1944. Approximately two months before they were discovered, Frank began to edit and rewrite this daily journal on loose pages of tracing paper given to her from her father’s office. She called this revised version of her diary Het Achterhuis (roughly, “The Annexe”) and mentions several times the possibility of its publication. While it is possible to show that she began work on this revision after considerable thought in late May 1944, its first entry is dated nearly two years earlier to 20 June, 1942; Frank was to maintain the pretence that the entries in this revised version (usually called the “loose papers” or “b text”) were being written as they occurred throughout her entire revision. The last entry in this revised text, presumably written about the time of her arrest in August, is 29 March, 1944 – a date which, as we shall see, is quite significant in terms of her development and inspiration. Finally, in addition to these two versions of her diaries, Frank also compiled a third text: a collection of short stories and other sketches known as Verhaaltjes van het Achterhuis (Frank 2001; transl. Frank 1994; Frank 2003). Some of these stories are based on incidents recorded in her daily journal or its revision; others have nothing obvious to do with her life in hiding.

Frank’s papers were rescued from the Annexe and returned to her father and de facto literary executor Otto Frank when it became clear that Anne Frank had died in the German concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Within days, he began to make a typewritten compilation from the surviving manuscripts which he then translated into German and sent to his mother in Switzerland as a memorial to her lost granddaughter. Both this typescript and the German translation appear to have been lost. Otto Frank then began a second typescript, this time intended for circulation within the Netherlands, and, perhaps, eventual commercial publication. Otto based his second typescript primarily on Frank’s revised version in the loose papers, but both added material from the notebooks and omitted various entries and elements he considered inessential, egregiously insulting to the memory of his wife, or to contain unfair or unfounded rumours about third persons (see the Nawoord in Frank 2004). This second compilation was edited for style by a playwright friend of the Frank family, Albert Cauvren, retyped and ultimately submitted to various publishing houses in the Netherlands for consideration. All printed editions and translations of Frank's diaries stem ultimately from this revised version of Otto Frank’s second typescript. Until the publication in 1986 of a critical edition of the surviving manuscripts, no complete text of Frank’s own revised version of the diaries was available to the public.4

4 The most detailed analysis of these changes is found in Lejeune 1998; translated and updated in

Lejeune 2009; a weakness of Lejeune’s analysis is its attribution of motivation for specific changes in published versions of the diaries to “Otto Frank”. In practice the published versions of the diary

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A fourth and, for our purposes, final complication in the textual history of the diaries came once they were accepted for publication – first by the Dutch publishing house Contact, and subsequently by publishing houses in France, Germany, and ultimately Doubleday in the United States. As with any work destined for commercial publication, Otto Frank’s typescript was edited by the staff at Contact for style and content. Changes were made in language, punctuation, and paragraph division in order to bring the text in line with the publisher’s house style, and more importantly, a number of entries (twenty-five in fact) were deleted as either too uninteresting, or, more often, too controversial for a general reading public. These included some discussion of menstruation and a scene in which Anne imagines touching a girlfriend’s breasts and expresses a desire to kiss her.

While his version of the diaries was being shopped around the Dutch publishers, Otto Frank also commissioned a new German translation of the complete transcription by his friend Anneliese Schütz. This version contained the scenes omitted by Contact’s more prudish editors, but seems to have been relatively free with the Diary’s specific wording – particularly its frequent negative references to German culture and people other than the Nazis (in addition to the account in Stroom 2004; see Lefevere 1992; Rosenfeld 2011). Thus Anne Frank’s observation in the entry for 17 November, 1942 that “toegestaan zijn alle cultuurtalen, dus geen Duits” (‘all civilized languages are permitted, therefore no German’), for example, becomes in German “Alle Kultursprachen... aber leise” (‘all civilised languages ... but softly’; ellipsis as in original); Frank’s heldenmoed in de oorlog of tegenover de Duitsers (‘heroism in the war or against the Germans’; 28 January, 1944), likewise, becomes Heldenmut im Kriege und im Streit gegen die Unterdrückung (‘heroism in war and in the struggle against the occupation’; for additional examples and discussion, see Stroom 2004; Lefevere 1992; Rosenfeld 2011; Schroth 2006).

The final major translation, into English for Doubleday, was based primarily on the first Dutch edition and the copy-edited typescript used by Contact. Added to this were some, but not all, of the episodes cut by Contact’s editors. The English edition is closer to the Dutch edition than the German in most readings, but, like all major translations and editions, contains some sentences and passages of uncertain origin, presumably to be attributed to an editor at some point in the production (see, for example, the entry for 22 May, 1944, in which the English text has a sentence found in no other version: “The Germans have a means of making people talk”).

represent an almost textbook example of a “social text”. For a discussion of this latter concept, see McGann 1992).



The result of all this is that there are at least eight, and, if we go on and discuss the American stage and screen adaptations, perhaps as many as eleven or twelve significantly divergent revisions, translations, and adaptations of Frank’s work, all of which are known in the popular imagination as “The Diary of Anne Frank” (see the figure in Stroom 2004, 77).5 I have gone through them here in order both to clarify the distinctions I am about to make between Frank’s own revisions and to give us some idea of the motives behind the work of those responsible for preserving, compiling, publishing, and translating her work since the war. Since Otto Frank’s first attempt to share his daughter’s diaries with the surviving members of his family, editors and publishers have tended to see the work as what Dutch historian Jacques Presser has described as an “ego-document”: “historical sources in which the researcher is faced with an ‘I’, or occasionally (Caesar, Henry Adams) a ‘he’, as the writing and describing subject with a continuous presence in the text” (Presser 1958; translation as in Dekker 2002, emphasis added). It is true that some attempts occasionally have been made to take her own express wishes for the documents into account: the Dutch edition of the Diary bears Frank’s preferred title and the list of pseudonyms used in all popular editions (the Van Daans, Dr. van Pels, Elli, Mr. Kugler, etc.) is ultimately based on a longer list proposed by Frank herself (see the facsimile in Frank 2004, 70; no edition of the diaries makes use of her full list, which included pseudonyms for herself and the rest of her family). But these wishes are also invariably subordinated to our own interests whenever they seem to clash with our ideas of the work’s real value: as a historical document, legal evidence (for a discussion of the effect legal concerns have had on the text of the diaries, see Lejeune 2009, 233–238; O’Donnell 1998; Frank 2004, Nawoord), as an adolescent diary (see Eleanor Roosevelt’s preface to the English translation, and, from a more clinical perspective, Dam 2001; Haviland & Kramer 1991; Evert 1991), a memorial to a lost daughter (see Stroom 2004; Frank 2004, Nawoord), or even an extremely lucrative commercial property (for excellent examples of this last influence, see Barnouw 1998; Heijmans 1998). Otto Frank combines parts of three distinct original manuscripts in order to give his friends and family a better picture of his dead child. The Dutch government submits Anne Frank’s manuscripts to the type of forensic examination otherwise reserved for potentially fraudulent legal documents. Otto Frank’s typescripts are edited and translated by commercial publishing houses with one eye firmly kept on what the market will accept (for a pre-publication anticipation of this concern, see Romein 1946). And nearly all readers of the published editions mention how fortunate we are to have such a well-written, but apparently spontaneous

5 Needless to say, this count excludes many other derivative and textually less significant

translations and adaptations of the diaries.

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account of the trials facing a young girl as she matures—in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt’s preface to the American edition—during those “crucial years from thirteen to fifteen in which change is so swift and so difficult for every young girl” (Roosevelt 1989, xi).

My goal here is not to criticize these motives (cf. Ozick 1997). With the exception of Revisionist and Neo-Nazi attacks on the diaries’ authenticity – which have frequently descended into the grossest of ad hominem insults towards Anne Frank, her father, and various other people involved in the diaries’ publication – each of these responses can be seen as a legitimate and appropriate approach to Frank’s work and our historical needs.

But it is also our need to use Frank’s work as a historical and memorial text that has obscured its literary value and purpose. While the diaries might serve the end to which we have put them, it is clear that these are not the goals Frank set herself when she began revising her work. As we shall see, Frank’s revisions were focussed less on memorialising her time in hiding than showing how this time in hiding led to her development as a person and a writer (the most significant discussions of Frank’s purpose in revising the diaries are Ozick 1997; Lejeune 1998; 2009). Her book is set in the war and its characters are Jews hiding from the Nazis, but it is not about the war, Jews in hiding, or the Nazis: anticipating in a certain sense the approach taken by the New Journalists of the 1960s (for contemporary discussions of “the New Journalism”, see Wolfe 1972; Arlen 1972), Het Achterhuis is a self-consciously constructed story of a young woman writer observing herself as she lives through history. By insisting on the documentary veracity of the diaries, we can fail to see the evidence of its careful use of artifice. While there is no evidence that Frank’s work is historically inaccurate in any significant way, there is considerable evidence to suggest that accuracy was not her primary goal in revising her journal for publication. What she does appear to have been doing, on the other hand, is crafting a compelling story, one that shapes the evidence of the diary kept in her original notebooks to produce a striking portrait of her development and time in hiding.

Perhaps the first thing to realise about this literary diary is how seriously and self-consciously Frank set about revising and rewriting her text for publication. On the one hand, it is clear from retrospective entries written in the margins and blank spaces of early entries in her notebooks that Frank had made a habit of returning to and commenting on her work throughout the time she was in hiding; the first retrospective discussion, indeed, dates from 28 September, 1942, just over a week after she first had the idea of casting the diary in epistolary form (see below). The idea that she might be able to publish her diaries as a book after the war, however, appears to have come to her as she listened to a broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein, the Dutch Minister of Education,



Arts and Sciences on 28 March, 1944 calling for the establishment of a national library of diaries, letters, and other first-hand material about life in the Netherlands under Nazi rule:

Geschiedenis kan niet alleen geschreven worden op grond van officieele bescheiden en archiefstukken. Wil het nageslacht ten volle beseffen wat wij als volk in deze jaren hebben doorstaan en zijn te boven gekomen, dan hebben wij juist de eenvoudige stukken noodig – een dagboek, brieven van een arbeider uit Duitschland, een reeks toespraken van een predikant of priester. Eerst als wij er in slagen dit eenvoudige, dagelijksche materiaal in overstelpende hoeveelheid bijeen te brengen, eerst dan zal het tafereel van dezen vrijheidsstrijd geschilderd kunnen worden in volle diepte en glans.

(Van der Stroom 2004, 69)

‘History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone. If our descendants are to understand fully what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents—a diary, letters from a worker in Germany, a collection of sermons given by a parson or a priest. Not until we succeed in bringing together vast quantities of this simple, everyday material will the picture of our struggle for freedom be painted in its full depth and glory’.

(Van der Stroom 2003, 59)

As Frank notes in her journal for the following day, the inhabitants of the Annexe immediately saw the relevance of her journal to this proposal, and “natuurlijk stormden ze allemaal direct op mijn dagboek af” (‘of course they all made a rush at my diary immediately’; 29 March 1944, version b).

Frank’s own response to this broadcast is more interesting. In his call for the preservation of a large number and wide range of personal documents, and his emphasis on their simplicity and ordinariness, Bolkestein was in fact asking for precisely the type of ego-documents Presser later described (and indeed, Presser’s thinking on this subject was influenced by his work with documents collected in response to Bolkestein’s call as part of his commission to write the official government history of the war). Instead of as a call to preserve her daily journal as an historical witness to the occupation, however, Frank seems to have seen Bolkestein’s announcement as an indication that there might be an audience for her writing after the war. While she clearly recognises the value of her diary as an historical document, she begins almost immediately to think of it in publishing terms. She describes how interessant ‘interesting’, and grappig ‘funny’, it might be to publish her work after the war. She gives the diary a

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possible title (Het Achterhuis ‘The Annexe’) and describes it as a roman ‘novel’ (in English versions of the text, roman is incorrectly translated as ‘a romance’), or even a detective-roman ‘detective novel’. Her description of its historical value, moreover, rapidly moves to the broader context of the general suffering of the Dutch people – most of which lay outside her immediate observation from the Annexe:

Stel je eens voor hoe interessant het zou zijn als ik een roman van het Achterhuis uit zou geven; aan de titel alleen zouden de mensen denken, dat het een detective-roman was. Maar nu in ernst het moet ongeveer 10 jaar na de oorlog al grappig aandoen as wij vertellen hoe we als Joden, hier geleefd, gegeten en gesproken hebben. Al vertel ik je veel van ons toch weet je nog maar een heel klein beetje van ons leven af.

Hoeveel angst de dames hebben als ze bombarderen, b.v. Zondag toen 350 Engelse machines ½ millioen kilo bommen op IJmuiden gegooid hebben, hoe dan de huizen trillen als een grassprietje in de wind, hoeveel epidemieën hier heersen, van al deze dingen weet jij niets af en ik zou de hele dag aan het schrijven moeten blijven als ik alles tot in de finesses na zou moeten vertellen. De mensen staan in de rij voor groente en alle mogelijke andere dingen, de dokters kunnen niet bij de zieken komen omdat om de haverklap hun voertuig wordt gestolen, inbraken en diefstallen zijn er plenty, zo zelfs dat je je af gaat vragen of de Nederlanders wat bezield dat ze opeens zo stelerig geworden zijn. Kleine kinderen van 8 en 11 jaar slaan de ruiten van woningen in en stelen wat los en vast zit. Niemand durft voor vijf minuten zijn woning te verlaten, want als je weg bent is je boel ook weg. Iedere (Elke) dag staan er advertentie’s met beloningen voor het terugbezorgen van gestolen schrijfmachine’s, perzische kleden, electrische klokken, stoffen enz. in de krant. Electrische straatklokken worden afgemonteerd, de telefoons in de cellen tot op de laatste draad uit elkaar gehaald.

De stemming onder de bevolking kan niet goed zijn, iedereen heeft honger, met een weekrantsoen kun je nog geen twee dagen uit komen, behalve dan het koffiesurrogat. De invasie laat lang op zich wachten, de mannen moeten naar Duitsland, de kinderen worden ziek of zijn ondervoed, alles heeft slechte kleren en slechte schoenen.

Een zool kost clandestien f7.50 daarbij nemen de meeste schoenmakers geen klanten aan of je moet 4 maanden op de schoenen wachten, die dikwijls intussen verdwenen zijn.

(29 March, 1944; version b) 6

6 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations and translations of Frank's work are from the Dutch

critical edition and its English translation (Frank 2004; 2003). The English translation often diverges in minor ways from Frank's original syntax and idiom. These divergences are noted when



‘Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance [sic: the correct translation should be “novel”] of the “Secret Annexe”. The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story. But, seriously, it would be quite funny 10 years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here. Although I tell you a lot, still, even so, you only know very little of our lives.

How scared the ladies are during the air raids. For instance on Sunday when 350 British planes dropped 1/2 million kilos of bombs on IJmuiden, how the houses trembled like a wisp of grass in the wind, and who knows how many epidemics now rage. You don’t know anything about all these things, and I would need to keep on writing the whole day if I were to tell you everything in detail. People have to line up for vegetables and all kinds of other things; doctors are unable to visit the sick, because if they turn their backs on their cars for a moment they are stolen; burglaries and thefts abound, so much so that you wonder what has taken over the Dutch for them suddenly to have become such thieves. Little children of 8 and 11 years break the windows of people’s homes and steal whatever they can lay their hands on. No one dares to leave his home unoccupied for five minutes, because if you go, your things go too. Every (Each) day there are announcements in the newspapers offering rewards for the return of lost property, typewriters, Persian rugs, electric clocks, cloth, etc. Electric clocks in the street are removed, public telephones are pulled to pieces, down to the last thread.

Morale among the population can’t be good, everyone is hungry, the weekly rations are not enough to last for two days except for coffee substitute. The invasion is a long time coming, and the men have to go to Germany, the children are ill or undernourished, all are wearing old clothes and old shoes.

A new sole costs 7.50 florins in the black market, moreover, hardly any of the shoemakers will accept shoe repairs or, if they do, you have to wait 4 months, during which time the shoes often disappear.’

The idea that her ‘book’ might be more than a simple eyewitness account takes hold and grows in the course of the next few months. Consoling herself on April 5 after a fit of depression about the slow progress of the war, Frank mentally sums up her abilities as a writer, concentrating on her style and effectiveness, and her hope that writing will give her the opportunity to have a career “naast man en kinderen” (‘besides husband and children’) unlike the women she sees around her in the Annexe:

they might otherwise obscure the argument being made. Translations of individual words and phrases quoted in isolation in my argument are my own.

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Een hele tijd wist ik helemaal niet meer waarvoor ik nu werk, het einde van de oorlog is zo ontzettend ver, zo onwerkelijk, sprookjesachtig en mooi. Als de oorlog in September nog niet afgelopen is dan ga ik niet meer naar school, want twee jaar wil ik niet achter komen. De dagen bestonden uit Peter, niets dan Peter, dromen en gedachten, totdat ik Zaterdagavond zo ontzettend lamlendig werd, nee vreselijk[...]

En nu is het helemaal over, ik moet werken om niet dom te blijven, om vooruit te komen, om journaliste te worden, want dat wil ik! Ik weet dat ik kan schrijven, een paar verhaaltjes zijn goed, m’n Achterhuis-beschrijvingen humoristisch, veel uit m’n dagboek spreekt, maar.... of ik werkelijk talent heb dat is nog te bezien.

Eva’s droom was m’n beste sprookje en het gekke daarbij is, dat ik heus niet weet waar het vandaan komt. Veel uit Cady’s leven is ook goed, maar het geheel is niets!

Ik zelf ben m’n scherpste en beste beoordelaar hier, ik weet zelf wat goed en niet goed geschreven is. Niemend die niet schrijft weet hoe fijn schrijven is; vroeger betreurde ik het altijd dat ik in ‘t geheel niet tekenen kon, maar nu ben ik overgelukkig dat ik tenminste schrijven kan.

En als ik geen talent heb om voor kranten of boeken te schrijven, wel dan kan ik nog altijd voor mezelf schrijven. Maar ik wil verder komen, ik kan me niet voorstellen dat ik moet leven zoals moeder, mevrouw v. P. en al die vrouwen, die hun werk doen en later vergeten zijn, ik moet iets hebben naast man en kinderen waar ik me aan wijden kan!

(5 April, 1944; version a)7

‘For a long time I haven’t had any idea of what I was working for any more, the end of the war is so terribly far away, so unreal, like a beautiful fairy tale. If the war isn’t over by September I shan’t go to school any more, because I don’t want to be two years behind. Peter filled my days—nothing but Peter, dreams and thoughts until Saturday night, when I felt so utterly miserable; oh, it was terrible [...]

And now it’s all over, I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the “Secret Annexe“ are humorous, there’s a lot in my diary that speaks, but—whether I have real talent remains to be seen.

“Eva’s Dream” is my best fairy tale, and the queer thing about it is that I don’t know where it comes from. Quite a lot of “Cady’s life” is good too, but, on the whole, it’s nothing!

I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work, I know myself what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn’t write doesn’t know

7 As noted above, the b version of the diaries stops with the entry for 29 March, 1944.



how wonderful it is; I used to bemoan the fact that I couldn’t draw at all, but now I am more than happy that I can at least write.

And if I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself. But I want to get on; I can’t imagine that I would have to lead the same sort of life as Mummy and Mrs. v.P. and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten, I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to!’

By 11 May, 1944, her planned book, now definitely to be called Het Achterhuis, is beginning to be understood as a distinct work, something that has to be finished alongside Cady’s Life (a novel she also worked on in the Annexe), and for which her daily journal can serve as a model and source:

Nu over iets anders: Je weet allang dat m’n liefste wens is dat ik eenmaal journaliste en later een beroemde schrijfster zal worden. Of ik deze grootheids—(waanzin!) neigingen ooit tot uitvoering zal kunnen brengen dat zal nog moeten blijken, maar onderwerpen heb ik tot nu toe nog wel. Na de oorlog wil ik in ieder geval een boek getiteld «het Achterhuis» uitgeven, of dat lukt blijft ook nog de vraag, maar m’n dagboek zal daarvoor kunnen dienen. Cady’s leven moet ook af [...]

(11 May, 1944; version a)

‘Now about something else: you’ve known for a long time that my greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later on a famous writer. Whether these leanings towards greatness (insanity!) will ever materialize remains to be seen, but I certainly have the subjects in my mind. In any case, I want to publish a book entitled het Achterhuis after the war, whether I shall succeed or not, I cannot say, but my diary will be a great help. Cady’s life must also be finished [...]’

Finally, on 20 May, 1944, she announces that she has “started” work on Het Achterhuis:

Eindelijk na heel veel overpeinzingen ben ik dan met m’n «Achterhuis» begonnen, in m’n hoofd is het al zover af als het af kan, maar in werkelijkheid zal het wel heel wat minder gauw gaan, als het wel ooit afkomt.

(20 May, 1944; version a)

‘At long last after a great deal of reflection I have started my “Achterhuis”, in my head it is as good as finished, although it won’t go as quickly as that really, if it ever comes off at all.’

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As this reference to the work being “as good as finished” in her head suggests, Frank’s book version of her journal (i.e. Het Achterhuis) was conceived of as a coherent whole – and hence not simply a selection of interesting entries from the nearly two years of notebooks she had collected by the middle of 1944. While the two works are of course extremely closely connected, the relationship is one of raw materials to finished product rather than first to second draft.

Anne Frank’s notebook on exhibition at the Anne Frank Museum in Berlin, April 5, 2009. © Heather Cowper, 2009. License: Creative Commons 2.0 BY.

When she turned from conception to execution, Frank drew on her experience with the notebooks. Most of the material in her revised text is drawn from the notebook diary and its formal features have been largely adopted and extended from techniques developed in the course of the a-text’s composition. As other have pointed out, these changes are particularly noticeable in the sections based on Frank’s earliest entries, where the work of the more mature fifteen- and sixteen-year-old writer of 1944 represents a great improvement in structure, style, and formal coherence over that of the just-turned-thirteen writer of 1942 (see particularly Lejeune 2009). That this refashioning is not simply an attempt to revise the earlier entries to reflect the greater maturity of her last year, however,



is suggested by the fact that the two works do not simply merge together by the beginning of 1944 when Frank reaches the height of her talent. Although the style and structure of the entries in her diary notebooks from the Spring and Summer of 1944 are very similar to those used throughout Het Achterhuis, Frank continues even at this late date to differentiate between the two works, both formally (as we have seen above in her statements about the genesis and development of Het Achterhuis and her other work intended for publication) and, as we shall see below, in terms of the type of content she includes in both works right through the last entries written before her arrest.

The most obvious example of the way Frank uses her experience with her diary in writing Het Achterhuis involves the decision to address all the entries in the book to “Kitty”. As Berteke Waaldijk has pointed out, “Kitty” is presumably modelled at least in part on the character “Kit Franken” (sometimes addressed as “Kitty”) in Cissy van Marxveldt’s Joop ter Heul series, and particularly in the first book, De H.B.S.-tijd van Joop ter Heul (see Waaldijk 1993, 332; the connection was first identified by Mirjam Pressler in the German translation of the Critical Edition, Frank 1988). “Kitty” is first addressed in Frank’s notebook diaries in the entry for 22 September, 1942 – an entry that is also notable because Frank also both mentions Joop ter Heul for the first time and reports that she has finished Van Marxveldt’s book so quickly that she has to wait until the following Saturday before she can get another (see Waaldijk 1993, 332).

At this early stage in her notebooks, Frank is still experimenting with form. Before 22 September, her entries were (for the most part implicitly) addressed to the diary itself, using the informal second person singular pronoun (jij) that Dutch speakers would use to address a friend. The entries are almost always dated and signed “Anne” or “Anne Frank”; a few times, this is prefaced by an informal and friendly dáág, roughly ‘see you’ or ‘cheerio’ (e.g. 1 August, 1942; 14 August, 1942). None of the entries in this section begin unambiguously with a salutation, though one fragment begins Lief dagboek (‘Dear diary’; see notebook page 51 [version a] in Frank 2004, 271: the intended date of this entry is ambiguous).

With the entry for 22 September 1942, Frank switches to the epistolary style that will characterise the rest of her notebook diaries and be adopted in her revisions for Het Achterhuis. Entries characteristically begin with an opening salutation and date and close with a signature. In the original notebooks, this is only occasionally preceded by a closing salutation: e.g. dáág Anne (‘see you, Anne’), je Anne (‘your Anne’), or je beste vriendin Anne (‘your best friend, Anne’). At this point, in keeping with van Marxveldt’s practice in De H.B.S.-tijd van Joop ter Heul, entries are addressed to different individuals, all but one of whom are characters in the Joop ter Heul books (Waaldijk 1993, 332). The decision to

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address entries in the original notebook diaries exclusively to “Kitty” was made sometime between December 1942 and November 1943 (the notebooks for this period are missing); when the notebooks resume in December 1943, all entries are addressed to “Kitty” (see Waaldijk 1993, 332).

The impulse to begin addressing entries in the original notebooks to characters from De H.B.S.-tijd van Joop ter Heul appears to have come from a combination of homage, boredom, and loneliness. The letters in this early section of the notebooks are a mix of fiction and fact, as Frank pretends that she too belongs to a club of friends much like the sociable Joop, and salts her letters with references to the events and characters in her fictional friends’ lives. She asks about her correspondents’ families and friends, instructs them to pass on greetings to others, writes similar letters to different correspondents, and shares gossip about her correspondents’ lives. Although most of the entries at this point seem to respect the real-world constraints of her life in hiding (see particularly her never-to-be-sent farewell letter to her real-world friend Jacqueline on 25 September, 1942) and of course are largely about the demands of life in the Annexe, Frank does at times seem to suggest that she is able to interact with some of her correspondents: she discusses the possibility of a sleepover with “Conny” on 27 September, having just spent een hele ochtend bij je moeder (‘the whole morning with your mother’). And in a letter to Kitty the previous day, Frank begins with what seems to be a response to Kitty’s news about her breakup with “Henk”:

Ik zal jouw er maar één keer tussenin schrijven, omdat ik me zo goed kan indenken hoe jij je nu moet voelen. Het is natuurlijk naar, maar Kit ik denk dat je wel iemand anders zult vinden; je vindt dit natuurlijk harteloos, want ik weet hoe oprecht lief je Henk had en ik had dit ook nooit van Henk verwacht, maar een groot voordeel Kitty heb jij, n.l. je kunt alles nog met moes bespreken, ik kan dit niet en met Pim sta ik wel zeer vertrouwelijk maar een vrouw is toch nog iets anders.

(26 September, 1942; version a)

‘For once I shall write to you out of turn, because I can well imagine how you must be feeling. It is disagreeable of course, but Kit I think you’ll have to find someone else; of course you’ll think me heartless, for I know how sincerely you love Henk and I had never expected that of Henk either, but you have a great advantage Kitty, that is that you can discuss everything with your mum, I can’t and though I am very close to Pim still a woman is different.’

As Waaldijk has suggested, these letters in the notebooks are extremely touching. They portray a young girl who is desperately lonely, bored, and scared



(many of the entries in this part are focussed on when and how they need to remain quiet). At this point in the development of Frank’s work, the focus of her diary is not so much to represent her world to outsiders as it is to bring a version of the outside world into the Annexe: to provide her with something to do to pass the time and give her an opportunity to escape to a more normal, if imaginary, social world. As Frank indicates when she first introduces the switch to the epistolary format to her original diaries (21 September, 1942), the change is in part born of desperation to communicate with somebody. The model letter that she uses to show what she intends to do is remarkable, and quite dissimilar even from the other letters in this section of the diary, in its emphasis on details that, with the exception of the comment about why she can’t work too long on her knitting, could as easily have come from her life before she went into hiding... or from the pen of Joop ter Heul:

Ik heb zo’n zin om met iemand te corresponderen, en dat zal ik dan in het vervolg maar met mijn dagboek doen. Ik schrijf dus nu in briefvorm wat feitelijk op hetzelfde neerkomt. Lieve Jettje, (zal ik maar zeggen,)

Mijn lieve vriendin, ik zal je in het vervolg en ook nu nog veel te vertellen hebben. Ik ben met breiwerk begonnen een trui uit van die witte wol. Maar ik mag er niet te veel aan breien anders is hij te gauw af. Ik heb nu ook een lichtje boven mijn bed gekregen. Dáág ik moet aardappels schillen voor het rottigste mens van de wereld, een beetje overdreven, maar ook maar een beetje. Groeten allemaal en zoenen van

Anne Frank (21 September, 1942; version a)

‘I would just love to correspond with somebody, so that is what I intend to do in future with my diary. I shall write it from now on in letter form, which actually comes to the same thing.

Dear Jettje, (I shall simply say,) My dear friend, both in the future as well as now I shall have a lot to

tell you. I have started knitting a sweater out of white wool. But I mustn’t knit too much otherwise it’ll be finished too soon. I now have a little light above my bed. ’Bye I’ve got to go and peel potatoes for the most rotten person in the world, that’s a bit exaggerated, but only a little bit. Regards to everyone and kisses from

Anne Frank’

The decision to turn the Diary into a letter-writing game seems to have had a profound effect on Frank’s early enjoyment and commitment to her diary. The frequency of entries picks up and a prefatory note added on 28 September to the front endpaper of her first notebook (seven days and twenty-eight “letters”

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after she first had the idea) describes how much more fun the new format is making it to keep writing:

Ik heb tot nu een grote steun aan je gehad, en ook aan onze lieve club die ik nu geregeld schrijf, deze manier om in mijn dagboek te schrijven vind ik veel fijner en nu kan ik het uur haast niet afwachten als ik tijd heb om in je te schrijven [...]

Ik ben, O, zo blij dat ik je meegenomen heb. (Voorblad, 28 September, 1942; version a)

‘I have had a lot of support from you so far, and also from our beloved club to whom I now write regularly, I think this way of keeping my diary is much nicer and now I can hardly wait until when I have time to write in you [...]

I am, Oh, so glad that I took you along.’ (Front endpaper, 28 September, 1942; version a)

When Frank comes to revise this raw material for publication in Het Achterhuis, however, she makes a number of telling changes. In keeping with the practice of her later notebooks, she simplifies the circle of correspondents to a single person, “Kitty”, who is now explicitly described as an imaginary character. She also rewrites all entries to conform to the epistolary style she began soon after reading Van Marxveldt’s work. Although boredom and loneliness are still mentioned as major motivations for keeping the diary, there is far less emphasis on the fun and sense of escape it provides. And perhaps most significantly, Frank rewrites the actual history of her notebooks to place herself at the centre of the decision to acquire and maintain a journal.

The strongest statement of this emphasis on Frank’s agency appears in the prefaces she wrote for her revised text. Two apparent drafts of this preface are now known to survive: an undated version, which was removed from Frank’s papers before publication and was largely unknown before its existence was revealed by Cor Suijk in 1998 (O’Donnell 1998), and a second version, dated to 20 June, 1942, which has appeared in modified form in all published editions and translations of the diaries and was first published in its original form in the first edition of the critical edition (Frank et al. 1986). Although there are significant differences between the two versions, the drafts agree in both presenting Kitty as a creation of Frank’s own imagination and suppressing the actual history of the notebook diaries as a gift from Frank’s parents.

The undated preface, which for a variety of textual and paleographic reasons appears to represent the earliest draft (see Hardy 2004, 210), has the most muscular presentation of Frank’s role in deciding to acquire and maintain her diary:



Het is een heel nieuwe en eigenaardige gewaarwording voor me om in een dagboek te schrijven. Ik heb het tot nu toe nog nooit gedaan en als ik een goeie vriendin zou hebben, die ik alles wat er op m’n hart ligt zou kunnen vertellen, zou ik er niet aan gedacht hebben me een dik, gecartonneerd schrift aan te schaffen en dat vol met onzin te krabbelen, die later niemand meer interesseert.

Maar, daar ik het schrift nu eenmaal gekocht heb, zal ik doorzetten en er voor zorgen dat het niet na een maand in een vergeten hoekje komt te liggen en ook zal ik er zorg voor dragen dat niemand het in zijn handen krijgt. Vader, moeder en Margot mogen wel heel lief zijn en ik kan hen ook wel veel vertellen maar met m’n dagboek en vriendinnen-geheimen hebben ze toch niets te maken.

Om me nu nog meer te verbeelden dat ik een vriendin heb, een echte vriendin die m’n liefhebberijen met me deelt en m’n zorgen begrijpt, zal ik m’n dagboek niet gewoon bijhouden, maar m’n brieven richten aan de vriendin-in-de-verbeelding Kitty.

(undated text, Frank 2004, 226-7; version b’)

‘Writing in a diary is a very new and strange experience for me. I’ve never done it before, and if I had a close friend I could pour my heart out to, I would never have thought of purchasing a thick, stiff-backed notebook and jotting down all kinds of nonsense that no one will be interested in later on.

But now that I’ve bought the notebook, I’m going to keep at it and make sure it doesn’t get tossed into a forgotten corner a month from now or fall into anyone else’s hands. Father, Mother, and Margot may be very kind and I can tell them quite a lot, but my diary and my girlfriend-only secrets are none of their business.

To help me imagine that I have a girlfriend, a real friend who shares my interests and understands my concerns, I won’t just write in my diary, but I’ll address my letters to this friend-of-my-own-imagination Kitty.’

(undated text, Frank 2003, 200-1; version b’)

In this version, both the diary and Kitty are presented as, in essence, emergency measures taken by Frank to address her lack of confidants and need to maintain personal emotional space and secrecy in the context of her new life in hiding. Frank tells us in this version that she bought the cardboard-covered notebook in which she will begin her diaries because she has no close friend to whom she can pour out her heart and that she intends to be diligent in its maintenance; in actual fact, of course, we know from the original diaries and eye-witness accounts that Frank was given the first notebook as a present from her parents on her birthday and was relatively diffident about its maintenance until several months after she went into hiding. In both this version and the probably

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subsequent dated draft, she explicitly identifies Kitty as a vriendin-in-de-verbeelding or “imaginary friend” (the published English translation, “friend-of-my-own-imagination”, makes a slightly stronger claim of originality than does the original Dutch) despite the fairly obvious connection to van Marxveldt’s work suggested by the original notebooks. Although she does not explicitly say that the diary is being kept in hiding, there is a sense of claustrophobia in this version of the preface that suggests she is thinking of her situation in the Annexe: Frank suggests she is the type of person who wouldn’t have thought of beginning a diary if she’d had a close friend to talk to; and in discussing who is available to her, she only mentions the members of her immediate family.

In the apparently later dated draft of this preface, Frank sharpens and deepens this portrait of herself as being the agent of her diaries’ creation. She removes the implication that she would never have turned to keeping a diary unless forced to by circumstance, arguing instead that she has a desire to write and that the impulse is only unusual in that she has never written much before and future audiences might not be interested in her content. As this suggests, this version of the preface also focusses much more explicitly and substantially on what others might think of her writing. She softens her determination to keep the diary secret from everyone to a suggestion that she might share it later with a particularly special friend; and in the last part of this preface, she goes even further, providing a historical sketch of her family background and current situation, “daar niemand iets van m’n verhalen aan Kitty zou snappen” (‘because nobody would understand anything about my letters to Kitty’), otherwise:

Het is voor iemand als ik, een heel eigenaardige gewaarwording om in een dagboek te schrijven. Niet alleen dat ik nog nooit geschreven heb, maar het komt me zo voor dat later noch ik, noch iemand anders in de ontboezemingen van een dertienjarig schoolmeisje belang zal stellen. Maar ja, eigenlijk komt dat er niet op aan, ik heb zin om te schrijven en nog veel meer om m’n hart over allerlei dingen eens grondig en helemaal te luchten. Papier is geduldiger dan mensen», dit gezegde schoot me te bin[nen t]oen ik op een van m’n licht-melancholieke dagen, verveeld met m’n hoofd op m’n handen zat en van lamlendigheid niet wist of ik uit moest gaan, dan wel thuis blijven, en zo uiteindelijk op dezelfde plek bleef zitten piekeren. Ja inderdaad, papier is geduldig, en daar ik niet van plan ben, dat gecartonneede schrift, wat de weidse naam «dagboek» draagt, ooit aan iemand te laten lezen, tenzij ik nog eens ooit in m’n leven een vriend of vriendin krijg, die dan «de» vriend of vriendin is, kan het waarschijnlijk niemand a schelen.

Nu ben ik bij het punt aangeland waarvandaan het hele dagboek-idée begonnen is; ik heb geen vriendin.



Om nog duidelijker te zijn, moet hierop een verklaring volgen, want niemand kan begrijpen dat een meisje van 13 geheel alleen op de wereld staat […] Daarom dit dagboek. Om nu het idee van de langverbeide vriendin nog te verhogen in m’n fantasie wil ik niet de feiten zo maar gewoon als ieder ander in dit dagboek plaatsen, maar wil ik dit dagboek, de vriendin-zelf laten zijn en die vriendin heet Kitty.

(20 June, 1942; version b) 8

It’s an odd idea for someone like me, to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I – nor for that matter anyone else – will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Still what does that matter? I want to write but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart. There is a saying that paper is more patient than man”; it came back to me on one of my slightly melancholy days while I sat chin in hand, feeling too bored and limp even to make up my mind whether to go out, or stay at home. Yes there is no doubt that paper is patient and as I don’t intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook, bearing the proud name of diary to anyone, unless I find a real friend, boy or girl, probably nobody cares.

And now I touch the root of the matter the reason why I started a diary; it is that I have no such real friend.

Let me put it more clearly, since no one will believe that a girl of 13 feels herself quite alone in the world […] Hence this diary. In order to enhance in my mind’s eye the picture of the friend for whom I have waited so long I don’t want to set down a series of bald facts in a diary like most people do, but I want this diary, itself to be my friend, and I shall call my friend Kitty.

Although Frank does not claim here that she bought the notebook herself, this version of the preface nevertheless also misrepresents the actual history of the diaries’ origins. The most important way it does this, of course, involves the choice of date: 20 June, 1942. This date is not “true” in the sense that it accurately reflects the date of original composition of this passage (there is no precise parallel to the preface in the original notebooks, which was presumably drafted some time after Frank describes her revised work as being finished “in her head” in May 1944). And it is equally not “true” in the sense that it does not represent the historical date on which Frank actually began to write in her diary: her birthday, 12 June, 1942.

8 The published translation for this passage uses a syntax that does not precisely match the cited

excerpt from the Dutch, although this does not affect my argument.

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Moreover, by dating its preface to 20 June, Frank avoids the implication that the decision came about as the result of anything but her own initiative. While she doesn’t say that she purchased the notebooks in the revised preface, she also avoids the implication that she was channelled into keeping a diary by her parents’ gift: 20 June falls eight days after the day on which she was actually given the first notebook. But because it falls two weeks before she and her family were forced into hiding, Frank also manages to avoid the implication, found in the presumably earlier first draft of the preface, that she was forced into writing by the extraordinary events that overcame her on 4 July, 1942. The “Anne” of this preface is the kind of person who keeps a diary because she wants to write, not because her parents happened to give her a diary for her birthday or because she has nothing else to do while whiling away her time in hiding.

This is interesting because it allows Frank to change the meaning we attach to her loneliness. In the original notebook diaries and in the first draft of the preface, Frank’s loneliness is largely circumstantial. In the notebooks in particular, the pre-Annexe Frank is a gregarious girl who participates with great glee in the social rounds and gossip of her class, has a number of closer and more-distant friends, and appears to be able to discuss relatively intimate secrets with at least a few boy- and girlfriends. This “Anne” is relatively uninterested in writing: in the original notebook, her initial diary-keeping is relatively spotty with large gaps between entries and greatly varying types and amounts of detail; and as we have seen, Frank suggested in the undated preface that she would not have taken up the diary at all if she’d had access to a close friend. Indeed, Frank’s adoption of the conceit of the circle of correspondents in her original notebooks is presented in part as a way of recreating her busy pre-Annexe social life: her initial letters create a pretend world in which a busy and extroverted “Anne” is able to continue the life of gossip, visits, and heart-to-heart discussions about boyfriends she enjoyed before her family was forced into hiding.

The dated version of the preface takes this situational loneliness and turns it into an existential condition. In this version, Frank is lonely and introspective because she is a lonely and introspective kind of person, one who feels emotionally and intellectually (rather than physically) distant from her friends and whose inability to communicate with them is the result of her own unease rather than the circumstances under which she finds herself. The “Anne” of the dated preface stays indoors and writes, not because she has been forced into hiding by the Nazis, but because she is prone to licht-melancholieke dagen (‘slightly melancholy days’), that leave her feeling too bored and languid to engage in the hustle of daily life with her friends. This Anne is not the kind of person who turns to a diary only as a last resort when deprived of her friends;



she is the type of person who keeps a diary because “papier is geduldiger dan mensen” (‘paper is more patient than people’), and because she finds writing in her diary to be more comfortable than sharing these same secrets with the boy- and girlfriends who she suggests she sees on a daily basis:

...niemand kan begrijpen dat een meisje van 13 geheel alleen op de wereld staat dat is ook niet waar: ik heb lieve ouders en een zuster van 16, ik heb alles bij elkaar geteld zeker wel 30 kennisjes en wat je dan vriendinnen noemt, ik heb een stoet aanbidders, die mij naar de ogen zien en als ’t niet anders kan, met een gebroken zakspiegeltje in de klas nog een glimp van me op trachten te vangen, ik heb familie, lieve tante’s, een goed thuis, nee zo ogenschijnlijk ontbreekt het me aan niets, behalve «de» vriendin. Ik kan met geen van m’n kennisjes iets anders doen dan pret maken, ik kan er nooit toe komen eens over iets anders dan over de alledaagse dingen te spreken, of wat intiemer te worden, en daar zit ’m de knoop. Misschien ligt dat gebrek van vertrouwelijkheid bij mij, in ieder geval het feit is er en het is jammer genoeg ook niet weg te werken. Daarom dit dagboek.

(20 June, 1942; version b)

‘...no one will believe that a girl of 13 feels herself quite alone in the world, nor is it so. I have darling parents and a sister of sixteen. I know about thirty people whom one might call friends, I have strings of boy friends, anxious to catch a glimpse of me and who, failing that, peep at me through mirrors in class. I have relations, darling aunts and a good home, no I don’t seem to lack anything, save “the” friend. But it is the same with all my friends, just fun and joking, nothing more. I can never bring myself to talk of anything outside the common round or we don’t seem to be able to get any closer, that is the root of the trouble. Perhaps I lack confidence, but anyway, there it is, a stubborn fact and I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. Hence this diary.’

The book this preface is intended for is not going to be a story of how a young girl became introspective and discovered a love of writing under exceptional circumstances; it is going to be a story of how unusual circumstances turned a young girl who already had a love of writing and an introspective personality into an exceptional writer. In order to emphasize this aspect of her personality and history, Frank shows herself willing to distort the known history of her diaries’ origins in order to make a larger, literary point.

A similar willingness to shape the known history of her life for literary ends can be seen in her “revision” of the pre-Annexe entries in her notebooks. In fact, calling these changes a “revision” misrepresents what is really going on. In contrast to her practice elsewhere in the diaries, Frank barely revises her original

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version at all: instead, she for the most part replaces these entries with almost entirely new material. With the exception of the notebook entry for 8 July (8 and 9 July in the revised text), which Frank rewrites and restructures considerably, almost nothing from this period in the original notebooks makes it into the revised text. Counting comments on the front papers, the original diary has six entries for the period 12 June-8 July, 1942: a brief comment on 12 June on the front papers, a burst of activity in the first week she owned the diary (entries for 14, 15, 16, and 19 June), and one final entry (for 30 June) before her account of the move to the Annexe (8 July).

In the revised text intended for publication as Het Achterhuis, on the other hand, Frank includes six substantial entries dated between 20 June (the date assigned to the revised preface) and the entries for 8 and 9 July which describe the move to the Annexe:9

Date Original Notebook Diary Revised Text

12 June Title page comment No entry

14 June Recounts birthday party and gifts; brief mention of the “Little Bear -2” club; first mention of relationship with Hello Silberberg)

No entry

15 June Classmate portraits No entry

16 June Classmate portraits, continued; Family history

No entry

20 June No entry Preface

20 June No entry “Little Bear -2” club; Frank’s comparative success with boys

21 June No entry Concern about exams; discussion of teachers

24 June No entry Restrictions faced by Jews;

9 Lejeune suggests that Frank was in fact much more prolific in her original notebooks than in the

revised text for this period (Lejeune 2009). This conclusion appears to be based upon a simple count of lines appearing in these parts of the notebooks and fails to exclude a large amount of retrospective material added by Frank at later dates (particularly late September, 1942).



first contact with Hello Silberberg

30 June Recap of week’s events; long account of various meetings and a date with Hello

No entry

1 July No entry Hello’s background; Hello visits the Franks’ house; Hello and Frank go out on date; Otto Frank hints to Anne about a hiding place

5 July No entry Examination results; waiting for Hello when the doorbell rings

8 July Flight to Annexe and description

Flight to Annexe

9 July No entry Description of Annexe

As the above table shows, moreover, there is very little overlap among the entries in the original and revised texts. Most of the material in the revised text is not found in the original notebook. What little is carried over is considerably reorganised and often drawn from other parts of the diary. The entry in the revised text for 20 June, for example, has no direct equivalent in the original notebooks, but draws on material from 16 June, 12 July, and a second, otherwise undated, entry for donderdag, juli 1942, (‘Thursday, July 1942’). In most cases, however, the revised version of Frank’s pre-Annexe life introduces new material.

The fact that Frank rewrote this section of her diary almost completely and, in contrast to her practice elsewhere in the revision, based the revised entries on what for the most part appears to be previously unrecorded material, suggests that she had something in mind for her portrait of pre-Annexe life that could not be accomplished with the existing notebook entries. In some cases, the changes are the result of an intrinsic incompatibility between the entries found in the original notebooks and the context sketched in her dated preface. By severing the connection between her birthday and the beginning of her diary, for example, Frank eliminates the need for almost everything from her entry for 14 June – from which, indeed, only the story of the “Little Bear minus two” club is retained – in her revised text. Likewise, the portrait in the dated preface of “Anne” as an intrinsically introverted and sensitive author-to-be is difficult to

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reconcile with the very gossipy and at times quite sharp set of classmate portraits found in her notebook entries for 15 and 16 June. Here too, only a small amount of material is carried over into the revised text, a modified version of her family history.

In other cases, the changes involve adding new material not found in this section of the original notebooks. Of these the two most significant are a discussion of the restrictions faced by Jews in Amsterdam (24 June, 1942) and a passage in which her father suggests he is the process of preparing a hiding place for the family (1 July, 1942), neither of which are directly reported elsewhere in the original notebooks. As Lejeune has suggested, both are probably best understood as examples of foreshadowing and establishing context for what is about to occur. From the moment Frank first responded to Bolkestein’s speech by thinking how grappig it would be to publish her work after the war, it is clear that she had an external audience in mind. This helps explain, for example, the considerable improvement in detail and organization of her description of the Annexe and the rest of her father’s building in the entry for 9 July, 1942 and her relatively consistent omission of intimate details of her emerging sexuality or developing feelings for Peter. Moreover, as we shall see, allowing her father to tell her in the revised text about his preparations in advance of Margot’s call-up allows Frank to simplify the narrative of 8-9 July by reducing the amount of new information she has to present.

A third type of change involves reshaping the material she does retain from the original notebooks. Thus, in keeping with her self-portrait in the dated preface as a reserved person with largely superficial contact with her friends, the pre-Annexe entries in the loose papers greatly reduce the number of friends Frank discusses by name and eliminates most of their most intimate and detailed conversations. This is particularly true of her relationship with Helmuth Silberberg (Hello). In revising this material for inclusion in the loose papers, she eliminates almost all the relatively obsessive discussions with her girlfriends about the status of her relationship with him and his connection to his previous girlfriend Ursula as well as a lovingly recorded, five-notebook-page-long transcription of her conversations with him during one of their early dates (see the notebook [version a] entry for 30 June).

Her relationship with Hello is also significant because, as with the history of the notebooks in her prefaces to the loose papers, Frank’s revisions alter what we can infer to be the actual history of their affair. In the original notebooks, Hello is first mentioned in the entry describing her birthday party (14 June). In this entry, we learn that Hello bought Frank six carnations for her birthday, that she is his real girlfriend even though he has been dating Ursula, and, a bit confusingly, that she is not in love with him even though everybody thinks she is.



Hello next appears in the notebooks in the entry for 30 June, where we learn that he and Frank met after Synagogue on 27 June and went out for ice cream at the Oase snack bar, and that she and Hello had a long walkabout together on the evening of 29 June. Finally, Hello makes a confusing appearance in the notebook entry for 8 July, when the account of the call-up is interrupted to explain that Hello and Freddie Weiss had been out with Frank at various times that Saturday and Sunday.

In the revised version, the history and presentation of this relationship is completely recast. In contrast to what we know from the original notebooks, in the revised version Frank first meets Hello on 22 June, when she saw him watching her at Wilma’s house. In this version, Hello introduces himself on 23 June, when he approaches her at the bicycle racks. Far from being his girlfriend, Frank at this point claims not to know about his intentions and coolly allows him to walk with her if they are going in the same direction anyway.

In the revised version, this relationship flourishes rapidly. Hello walks her to school on 23 and 24 June and by the end of the week they know a lot about each other. Hello visits Frank’s family on 29 June, and they go for a long walk after (which in fact gets her into trouble for staying out too late). Frank is supposed to visit Hello’s parents on 4 July, although the visit is not mentioned in her last pre-Annexe entry in the revised text (5 July), which closes with the note that the door bell has just rung and she is expecting him back at her house: “Net belt het, Hello komt, ik sluit.” (‘There goes the doorbell, Hello’s here, I’ll stop’). The next thing we read is how much her life has changed as a result of that ringing at the door.

Although it misrepresents what we can infer to be the actual history of her relationship with Hello, this reshaping allows Frank to improve her presentation of the key event in this section of the diary, Margot’s call-up and the family’s flight into hiding. In the original notebook entry, the dominant impression is one of confused activity:

Ik moet nu nog een heleboel in mijn dagboek schrijven, Zondag was Hello bij mij, Zaterdag waren we met Freddie Weiss uit, natuurlijk o.a. ook bij oase. Zondagmorgen lagen Hello en ik in de zon op ons balcon, Zondagmiddag zou hij terugkomen, maar om ongeveer 3 uur kwam een politieagent bij moeder die riep beneden in de deur, mej. Margot Frank, moeder ging naar beneden en kreeg van de agent een kaart, waar opstond dat Margot Frank zich moest melden bij de S.S.

Moeder was helemaal overstuur en ging direct naar men. van Pels hij kwam direct mee naar ons toe en aan mij werd verteld dat Papa opgeroepen was. De deur werd afgesloten en niemand mocht meer in ons huis. Papa en mama hadden al lang maatregelen genomen, en moeder

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verzekerde mij dat Margot niet zou gaan en dat we de volgende dag allemaal weg zouden gaan. Ik begon natuurlijk erg te huilen en er was een ontzettende drukte bij ons in huis.

(8 July, 1942; version a)

‘I still have a whole lot to write in my diary, on Sunday Hello came over to our place, on Saturday we went out with Freddie Weiss, and over to oasis of course. On Sunday morning Hello and I lay on our balcony in the sun, on Sunday afternoon he was going to come back, but at about 3 o’clock a policeman arrived and called from the door downstairs, Miss Margot Frank, Mummy went down and the policeman gave her a card which said that Margot Frank has to report to the S.S.

Mummy was terribly upset and went straight to Mr. van Pels he came straight back to us and I was told that Daddy had been called up. The door was locked and no one was allowed to come into our house any more. Daddy and Mummy had long ago taken measures, and Mummy assured me that Margot would not have to go and that all of us would be leaving next day. Of course I started to cry terribly and there was an awful to-do in our house.’

Apart from the seriousness of the events recorded, this version of call-up and flight is rhetorically more-or-less identical to the style and organisation used in the preceding entries: Frank records events primarily in the order in which they occur, jumps from one topic to the other, and makes no real attempt to distinguish rhetorically between significant and insignificant matters: the details of her Saturday with Hello and Freddie Weiss appear just as prominently as the ultimately more important information about the knock at the door from the S.S. on the Sunday afternoon.

The revised version, in contrast, emphasizes the extent to which the events of 5-6 July, 1942 represent a break with her former life:

Lieve Kitty, Vanaf Zondagmorgen tot nu lijkt een afstand van jaren, er is zoveel

gebeurd dat het is of de hele wereld zich plotseling omgedraaid heeft, maar Kitty, je merkt, dat ik nog leef, en dat is de hoofdzaak, zegt vader.

Ja, inderdaad ik leef nog, maar vraag niet waar en hoe. Ik denk dat je vandaag helemaal niets van me begrijpt, daarom zal ik maar beginnen met je te vertellen wat er Zondagmiddag gebeurd is.

Om 3 uur, (Hello was even weggegaan, om later terug te komen) belde er iemand aan de deur, ik hoorde het niet daar ik lui in een ligstoel op de veranda in de zon lag te lezen. Even later verscheen Margot in een opgewonden toestand aan de keukendeur. «Er is een oproep van de S.S.



voor vader gekomen,» fluisterde ze «moeder is al naar mijnheer van Pels gegaan».

Ik schrok ontzettend, een oproep, iedereen weet wat dat betekent, concentratiekampen en eenzame cellen zag ik al in m’n geest opdoemen en daarnaartoe zouden wij vader moeten laten vertrekken. «Hij gaat natuurlijk niet», verklaarde Margot mij toen wij in de kamer op moeder zaten te wachten «moeder is naar v.P. om te vragen of we morgen naar onze schuilplaats kunnen vertrekken. V.P. gaan met ons mee schuilen. We zijn daar dan met ons 7». Stilte [...]

Plotseling belde het weer. «Dat is Hello», zei ik. «Niet open doen», hield Margot, me tegen, maar dat was overbodig, we hoorden moeder en mijnheer v.P. beneden met Hello praten, dan kwamen ze binnen en sloten de deur achter zich dicht. Bij elke bel, moesten Margot of ik nu zachtjes naar beneden om te zien of het vader was, andere mensen lieten wij niet toe.

Margot en ik werden uit de kamer gestuurd, v.P. wou met moeder alleen spreken. (V.P. is een kennis en medecompagnon in vaders zaak) Toen Margot en ik in onze slaapkamer zaten, vertelde zij dat niet vader maar haar de oproep trof. Ik schrok opnieuw en begon dan te huilen. Margot is 16, zulke jonge meisjes willen ze dus alleen weg laten gaan, maar gelukkig ze zou niet gaan, moeder had het zelf gezegd, en daarop zouden ook vaders woorden dan wel gedoeld hebben, toen hij het met mij over schuilen had.

(8 July, 1942; version b)

‘Dear Kitty, Years seem to have passed between Sunday and now, so much has

happened, it is as if the whole world had turned upside down, but I am still alive, Kitty, and that is the main thing, Daddy says.

Yes, I’m still alive indeed, but don’t ask where or how. You wouldn’t understand a word, so I will begin by telling you what happened on Sunday afternoon.

At three o’clock (Hello had just gone, but was coming back later) someone rang the front doorbell, I was lying lazily reading a book on the veranda in the sunshine, so I didn’t hear it. A bit later, Margot appeared at the kitchen door looking very excited. “The S.S. have sent a call-up notice for Daddy”, she whispered “Mummy has gone to see Mr. van Pels already”.

It was a great shock to me, a call-up; everyone knows what that means, I picture concentration camps and lonely cells—should we let him be doomed to this? “Of course he won’t go”, declared Margot while we waited together “Mummy has gone to the v.P.s to ask whether we should move into our hiding place tomorrow. The v.P.s are going with us, there will be 7 of us in all”. Silence [...]

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Suddenly the bell rang again. “That is Hello”, I said. “Don’t open the door”. Margot held me back, but it was not necessary as we heard Mummy and Mr. v.P. downstairs talking to Hello, then they came in and closed the door behind them. Each time the bell went Margot or I had to creep softly down to see if it was Daddy, not opening the door to anyone else.

Margot and I were sent out of the room, v.P. wanted to talk to Mummy alone (v.P. is an acquaintance and a partner in Daddy’s business). When we were alone together in our bedroom, Margot told me that the call-up did not concern Daddy but her. I was more frightened than ever and began to cry. Margot is 16, would they really take girls of that age away alone? But thank goodness she won’t go, Mummy said so herself, that must be what Daddy meant when he talked about us going into hiding.’

In this case, Frank has no difficulty emphasising what is important and capturing the drama of the moment. In addition to being longer and split over two days (in the revised version Frank divides the material between entries for 8 and 9 July, 1942), there is more dialogue and far more suspense: whereas in the first version we learn immediately who has been called up by the Germans (Frank of course knew by the time she sat down to write the entry), the revised version builds suspense by withholding the information until later, when Frank herself had in fact originally learned it in real life.

The treatment of Hello’s visit in this revision is particularly striking, however. In rewriting the entry for 8 July, Frank takes what was a distraction in the original account and turns it into a powerful device for emphasising the break the call-up has established between her old and new lives. In the pre-Annexe entries in the revised text, Frank uses her relationship with Hello to create a sense of beginning and provide a rhythm to her last days of freedom. In contrast to the original notebooks, where the relationship is apparently already in place by her birthday and stumbles along inconclusively, in her revised entries, there is a clear beginning and narrative arc: first contact, first date, deepening friendship, introduction to parents, and the first evidence that the couple are comfortable enough with each other to come and go as they please at each other’s house.

In the entry for 8 July, however, Hello is transformed from comfort to (potentially deadly) threat: in the suddenly upside down world she now inhabits, “Anne” is suddenly forced to fear Hello’s previously warmly anticipated return to the house. The girl who, exactly a week earlier in this revised text, first introduced Hello to her parents and got in trouble for staying out with him too



late is now the one who tells her family to keep Hello out and is relieved when her mother sends him away.

The changes Frank introduces in the section leading up to her family’s move to the Annexe are striking because they are so bold and because they show that Frank was willing to alter the details of her life as recorded in her original notebooks in order to improve the rhetorical effectiveness of the version she intended to publish. Although, as far as we can tell from the surviving evidence, in later sections she generally stays closer to the details of the events recorded in her original notebooks, Frank nevertheless continues to edit this material, supplementing or removing particular details from her revised text.

Among the later entries of the diaries, this deliberation can be seen perhaps most strongly in her discussion of the affair with Peter van Pels and reminiscences about previous loves. Like any person experiencing the ups and downs of a new relationship, Frank spends a lot of time in her original notebooks gushing about her hopes and fears for her connection with Peter. She reports dreams about old boyfriends, wonders about the future with her new boyfriend, and spends a remarkable amount of time describing how she looked in Peter’s eyes or placed her cheek beside his. A good writer by the beginning of 1944 – the time at which her affair reaches its height – these passages are almost invariably commented upon by readers and critics as being most characteristic of Frank’s work.

The trouble is, however, as Lejeune (2009) has pointed out, that Frank in fact cut most of these passages from her revised text. While she acknowledges the beginning of the affair and subsequent rise in intensity in Het Achterhuis, she nevertheless also removes most examples of her most purple prose. The fact that we know them so well is due to Otto Frank who put them back in by copying the entries directly out of the original journal when he came to make his typescript compilation. The difference this makes in Frank’s diary as a whole can only be appreciated in the critical edition, where one finds page after page of gushy descriptions of her love affair and dreams in the original notebooks and the first printed edition, with Frank’s own revised manuscript represented by ellipsis. Here, for example, is the end of the original entry for 6 January, 1944 alongside Frank’s revised version (dated to 7 January, 1944), in which she discusses her love for a former boyfriend, Peter Schiff:

Het gezegde zegt: Tijd geneest alle wonden, zo ging het ook met mij, ik verbeeldde me dat ik Peter vergeten was en hem helemaal niet meer aardig vond, maar toch leefde in mijn onderbewustzijn de herinnering zo sterk voort dat ik in mezelf toegaf, dat ik jaloers was op die andere meisjes en daarom hem niet meer aardig vond. Vanochtend heb ik begrepen dat

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niets in mij veranderd is, integendeel, terwijl ik groter en rijper werd, groeide m’n liefde in me mee.

Ik kan nu goed begrijpen, dat Peter me kinderachtig vond en toch trof het me steeds weer pijnlijk dat hij me zo vergeten was. (had).

Zijn gelaat kwam zo duidelijk voor m’n geest, dat ik nu weet, dat niemand anders zo in me kan blijven zitten. Ik houd van Peter met alles wat in me is. Vandaag ben ik dan ook helemaal in de war. Toen vader me vanochtend een zoen gaf, wilde ik wel schreeuwen: «O, was je Peter maar!» Bij alles denk ik aan hem en de hele dag, herhaal ik niets anders bij mezelf dan: «O Petel, lieve lieve Petel....

Wat kan me nu helpen? Ik moet verder leven en God bidden, dat hij als ik hier uit kom Peter op m’n weg zal brengen en dat die, terwijl hij in m’n ogen m’n gevoelens leest, zal zeggen «O Anne, als ik dat had begrepen, had ik je allang gevraagd!»

Vader zei eens tegen me, toen we over sexualiteit spraken, dat ik die begeerte toch nog niet kon begrijpen, ik wist altijd dat ik het wel begreep en nu begrijp ik het helemaal. Niets is me nu nog zo dierbar als hij, mijn Petel!

— Ik heb in de spiegel m’n gezicht gezien en dat ziet er zo anders uit,

dan anders. M’n ogen zien zo helder en zo diep, m’n wangen zijn, wat in weken niet gebeurd is, rose gekleurd, m’n mond is veel weker, ik zie er uit of ik gelukkig ben en toch is er zoiets droevigs in m’n uitdrukking, m’n glimlach glijdt meteen van m’n lippen af. Ik ben niet gelukkig want ik zou kunnen weten, dat Petels’ gedachten niet bij mij zijn en toch, toch voel ik steeds weer z’n mooie ogen op me gericht, en zijn koele, zachte wang tegen de mijne.....

O Petel, Petel, hoe kom ik ooit weer van je beeld los? Is ieder ander in je plaats, niet een armzalig surrogaat? Ik houd van je, o met zoveel liefde, dat die niet langer in m’n hart kon groeien, maar te voorschijn springen moest en zich plotseling, in zo’n geweldige grote aan mij openbaarde.

Een week geleden, een dag geleden, zou ik als je me gevraagd had: «Wie van je kennissen, zou je het meest geschikt vinden, om mee te trouwen? geantwoord hebben: «Sally, want bij hem is het goed, rustig en veilig!»

En nu zou ik schreeuwen, «Petel, want van hem houd ik met geheel mijn hart, met geheel mijn ziel in volledige overgave!» Behalve dat éne, hij mag me niet verder aanraken, dan in m’n gezicht.

Ik zat in m’n gedachten vanochtend met Petel op de voorzolder, op het hout voor de ramen en na een kort gesprek, begonnen wij alle-twee te huilen en later voelde ik zijn monde en zijn heerlijke wang! O Petel, kom bij mij, denk aan mij, mijn eigen lieve Petel!

(6 January, 1944; version a)



‘The saying says: Time heals all wounds, and so it was with me, I imagined that I had forgotten Peter and that I didn’t like him a bit any more, but his memory lived on so strongly in my subconscious mind that I had to admit to myself that I was jealous of the other girls, and that was why I didn’t like him any more. This morning I knew that nothing has changed in me; on the contrary, as I grew bigger and more mature my love grew with me.

I can quite understand now that Peter thought me childish, and yet it still hurt that he had so completely forgotten me.

His face comes so clearly to mind that now I know that no one else can stay with me like he does. I love Peter with all my heart. I am still completely upset today too. When Daddy kissed me this morning, I could have cried out: “Oh, if only you were Peter!” I think of him all the time and I keep repeating to myself the whole day, “Oh, Petel, darling darling Petel…..

What can help me now? I must live on and pray to God that He will let Peter cross my path when I come out of here, and that when he reads the love in my eyes he will say, “Oh Anne, if I had only realized, I would have asked you long ago!”

Once when we spoke about sex, Daddy told me that I couldn’t possibly understand the longing yet, I always knew that I did understand it and now I understand it fully. Nothing is so beloved to me now as he, my Petel.

— I saw my face in the mirror and it looks quite different than at other

times. My eyes look so clear and deep, my cheeks are pink – which they haven’t been for weeks – my mouth is much softer; I look as if I am happy, and yet there is something so sad in my expression and my smile slips away from my lips as soon as it has come. I’m not happy because I should know that Petel’s thoughts are not with me, and yet I still feel his wonderful eyes upon me and his cool, soft cheek against mine...

Oh Petel, Petel, how will I ever free myself of your image? Wouldn’t any other in your place be a miserable substitute? I love you, and with such a great love that it can’t grow in my heart any more but has to leap out into the open and suddenly manifest itself in such a tremendous way!

A week ago, even yesterday, if you had asked me, “Which of your friends do you consider would be the most suitable to marry? I would have answered: “Sally, for he makes me feel good, peaceful and safe!”

But now I would cry, “Petel, because I love him with all my heart and soul, I give myself completely!” But one thing, he may touch my face, but no more.

This morning I imagined I was in the front attic with Petel, sitting on the wooden window sill and after a short conversation, the two of us started to cry and then I felt his mouth and his wonderful cheek! Oh Petel, come to me, think of me, my own dear Petel!

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In the revised version, Frank cuts out the direct reporting of the dream as well as much of her internal conversation, focussing instead on the implications for her post-war future (text: version b):

Er bestaat een gezegde: Tijd geneest alle wonden, zo ging het ook met mij; ik verbeeldde me dat ik Peter vergeten was en hem totaal niet aardig meer vond. De herinnering aan hem leefde echter zo sterk voort, dat ik mezelf wel eens bekende dat ik jaloers was op die andere meisjes en daarom hem niet meer aardig vond. Vanochtend heb ik gemerkt dat niets veranderd is, integendeel, terwijl ik ouder en rijper werd, groeide m’n liefde in me mee. Zijn gelaat vertoonde zich zo duidelijk aan me, en ik weet, dat niemand anders zo in me kan blijven vastzitten.

Na de droom ben ik geheel in de war. Wat kan me helpen? Ik moet gewoon verder leven en God bidden dat hij als ik hier uitkom, Peter op m’n weg zal brengen en dat die, terwijl hij in m’n ogen m’n gevoelens leest zal zeggen: «O Anne, als ik dat geweten had, was ik allang bij je gekomen»

je Anne (7 January, 1944; version b)

‘There is a saying: Time heals all wounds and so it was with me; I imagined that I had forgotten Peter and that I didn’t like him at all any more. The memory of him, however, lived on so strongly that I admitted to myself sometimes I was jealous of the other girls, and that was why I didn’t like him any more. This morning I realised that nothing has changed; on the contrary, as I grew older and more mature my love grew with me. His face was shown so clearly to me, and I know that no one else can remain with me like he does.

I am completely upset by the dream. What can help me now? I must live on and pray to God that He will let Peter cross my path when I come out of here, and that when he reads the love in my eyes he will say: “Oh Anne, if I had only known, I would have come to you long before”.

yours, Anne’

No matter how attractive and innocent we may find Frank’s adolescent musings on love and boys, it is clear that she herself did not want us to give it nearly as much prominence as we do.

There is one other significant fact about the above passages, however: namely that they date from January 1944, not July 1942. In less than four months, Frank will hear Bolkestein’s call for the collection of diaries and other eyewitness accounts on the radio and begin mapping out her plans for her own



publication of Het Achterhuis. Where the changes to the earliest entries from 1942 might be explained away as a natural reflection of Frank’s greater maturity at the time of her revision and the experience she has acquired in the course of two years of near continuous writing, the changes she makes here are to material written almost coincidentally with her decision to revise her work for publication. The fact that she continues to write entries in a similar vein in her daily journal right up until her arrest, but to omit or drastically edit such entries when they occur in the material she is revising suggests that the problems she saw with these entries was primarily editorial: the presence of “musings about her life, relationship with her parents, emerging sexuality, and movie stars” in her daily journals does not mean she intended to include them in her final book.

Frank’s revision of the diaries stops with the entry for 29 March, 1944—the day she mentions Bolkestein’s speech and first discusses “hoe interessant het zou zijn als ik een roman van het Achterhuis uit zou geven” (‘how interesting it would be if I were to publish a novel of the ‘Secret Annexe’). Given the effort she put into shaping the account of her pre-Annexe life for rhetorical effect, it is tempting to imagine that she intended for her self-portrait to end with the entry in which she first thought of revising her work for publication. Unfortunately, however, there is nothing in the entry to suggest that the fact this is the last entry is anything other than a horrible coincidence – the last entry she happened to be working on before the Annexe was raided by the authorities. In contrast to the control she shows in her creating and revising the entries describing the day in which her family was forced into hiding, there is no sense of a conclusion in the revised version of 29 March and many of her most interesting entries on her development as a writer come in the months after she first sees the possibility in her material.

The important thing, however, is that we would expect Frank to build her work to a conclusion rather than simply end it. As we have seen, Het Achterhuis is in fact a text that has been very carefully constructed along the lines Frank originally suggested in her entry describing Bolkestein’s speech and in subsequent notebook entries describing her progress. Although it is a book “by a young girl full of musings about her life, relationship with her parents, emerging sexuality, and movie stars”, it is, in the end, not just a book “by a young girl full of musings about her life, relationship with her parents, emerging sexuality, and movie stars” – or an unproblematic source of Holocaust historiography. In preparing her work for publication, Frank was clearly trying to do more than report with documentary accuracy about her development and life within the Annexe. Rather, like many artists, she was in fact attempting to create an artistic vision of the experience that turned her into a writer. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the revisionists’ calumny that Frank’s diary is a hoax. But

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the proof against these claims does not necessarily lie in the accuracy of her family’s cleaning schedule. The real proof lies in the proficiency with which Frank reworks her material to create an artistic legacy.

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About the author

Daniel Paul O'Donnell is a textual critic and digital humanist in the English department at the University of Lethbridge. He has written and lectured on the Diary of Anne Frank for popular and scholarly audiences. Apart from his work with the Diary of Anne Frank, he has edited the Old English poem Caedmon's Hymn, and is currently leading projects focussed on the scholarly use of 3D scanning, the sustainability of scholarly publishing, and the global practice of Digital Humanities.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/why-the-bbc-ignored-the-holocaust-antisemitism-in-the-top-ranks-of-broadcasting-and-foreign-office-staff-led-to-the-news-being-suppressed-says-stephen-ward-1462664.html



http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Faurisson&oldid=495412235

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Faurisson_affair&oldid=490545713

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_best-selling_books&oldid=497551495

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_best-selling_books&oldid=497551495

http://nymag.com/news/media/47353/

daniel paul o’donnell - welcome to caans acaen · daniel paul o’donnell this article examines...

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